The False Friend

(Doubleday; 253 pages; $25.95)

There are few things more difficult than admitting to a lie. Of course, the confession also brings relief - that great, cathartic unburdening. But what if you finally muster the courage to admit to your lie and no one believes you? Worse, you are told that the lie was your memory's own invention? This is the surreal situation Celia Durst navigates in Myla Goldberg's new novel, "The False Friend."

Goldberg has dealt in secrets and lies in her other work. Her phenomenally popular debut novel, "Bee Season," follows the Naumanns - a family who live together in isolation from each other, each member guarding his or her own inner sanctum. Goldberg offers a fairly clear judgment on life lived this way: The weight of her secret drives the mother insane. While "The False Friend" lacks the narrative breadth of her first book (infusing a spelling bee champion with Zohar mysticism is pretty inspired), it is a compelling exploration of the fallibility of memory, explored through richly drawn characters, none more so than Goldberg's struggling protagonist, Celia.

Celia's lie is not a trivial one. When she was 8, she and a pack of girlfriends went into the woods. As Celia remembers it, she was viciously fighting with her best friend/archrival (the mellifluously named Djuna Pearson) when Djuna suddenly fell into a hole. Celia ran back and told the other girls that Djuna had gotten into a car with a stranger. She tells her parents and the police the same story. No one ever sees Djuna again.

Twenty years later, Celia is living a nondescript life in Chicago. She has a stable job, a kind boyfriend named Huck and two beloved dogs. Then something simple - a red VW bug - triggers the long-buried memory of her lie: "a false wall crumbled to reveal a maze of other rooms, Djuna standing at the center of each one," and she realizes what the terrible ramifications of that lie probably were.

Immediately, she takes a flight back to her childhood home, Jensenville, ready to own up to the truth she'd repressed all these years. The "terminally postindustrial" Jensenville is clearly meant to mirror Celia's own stagnation. As the book unfolds, it's evident that Celia's life is suspended: She won't marry her boyfriend, won't have the babies he wants to have. She can't leave her childhood, not until she finds out what really happened to Djuna. So Celia embarks on a mission to track down each girl who was there the day Djuna disappeared. She needs to confirm the accuracy of her memory, to confirm the truth of her lie.

But, as it typically goes with all quests for ultimate truth, Celia unearths things she hadn't anticipated - namely, the awful realization that she was a cruel kid: "Becky's words had knocked something loose, something oddly shaped with a jagged edge." This is the most interesting idea Goldberg explores: the chasm between the children we are and the adults we become. Goldberg doesn't flinch from depicting - accurately - the borderline sociopathic behavior that makes these young girls ritualize torment. And she is right to describe the girls as a hive:

"Celia had known when Djuna ate her dinner, when Becky took her bath. She had prized this information with the inarticulate ardor that presages sex. Back when passion was still in utero - a beating heart without legs - its rudiments had been present but primal, means that had not yet acquired perceivable ends."

To reveal each woman's reaction to seeing Celia again would spoil the most gratifying moments in the book. But their disparate memories of the day Djuna disappeared underlines Goldberg's major point that memory is both fickle and malleable, an idea that is beautifully depicted through Celia's reaction to a painting one of her rediscovered childhood friends has made. It shows the girls on that fateful day, surrounded by swaths of blank space. When Celia sees the painting, she is (wrongly) convinced the woman has remembered the day as she does. The artist explains that the reason she left the blank space is so "others can fill it in" however they choose. And so, Goldberg shows us through her haunting final pages, it is too with memory.